For better and for worse, higher education has been transformed over the last fifty years. Among the most positive developments are the increasing diversity of our campus communities and expanded access for women and minoritized groups, as well as first-generation and lower-income students who were historically excluded. These gains—shaped in no small part by social movements and forms of scholar-activism—now face a fierce backlash, including institutional retrenchment from commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

Harvard Professors Evelynn M. Hammonds and Timothy Patrick McCarthy bring decades of scholarship, teaching, and leadership to a frank conversation about the history of progress, the role of activism, the dynamics of the current backlash, and the uncertain future of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Drawing on Hammonds’s work at the intersections of science, medicine, race, and gender and her experience as former Dean of Harvard College, and on McCarthy’s leadership in global LGBTQI+ human rights and DEI, as well as his historical scholarship on social movements and freedom struggles, they consider how researchers and educators navigate the tension between system conformity and utopian aspiration: when institutions accommodate the moment, and when they choose to act.
The session will be grounded in movement histories and the practice of scholar-activism, while signaling the speakers’ primary foci (race, gender, sexuality, social movements, science and medicine) and welcoming perspectives that extend the conversation (including disability and inclusive practice). We conclude by asking what this moment requires of our research—methodologically, ethically, and politically—and whether, under today’s conditions and given an inclusive stance, meaningful change can occur without activism.